1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to video indexing, archiving, editing and production, and, more particularly, this invention teaches a system for parsing video content automatically.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's information world, the importance of acquiring the right information quickly is an essential aspect we all face. Given so much information and databases to process, how we make full use of the technological advancement to our advantage is what this present invention is addressing. Information about many major aspects of the world, in many cases, can only be successfully managed when presented in a time-varying manner such as video sources. However, the effective use of video sources is seriously limited by a lack of viable systems that enable easy and effective organization and retrieval of information from these sources. Also, the time-dependent nature of video makes it a very difficult medium to manage. Much of the vast quantity of video containing valuable information remains unindexed. This is because indexing requires an operator to view the entire video package and to assign index means manually to each of its scenes. Obviously, this approach is not feasible considering the abundance of unindexed videos and the lack of sufficient manpower and time. Moreover, without an index, information retrieval from video requires an operator to view the source during a sequential scan, but this process is slow and unreliable, particularly when compared with analogous retrieval techniques based on text. Therefore, there is clearly a need to present a video package in very much the same way as a book with index structure and a table of content. Prior art teaches segmentation algorithm to detect sharp camera breaks, but no method detects gradual transitions implemented by special editing techniques including dissolve, wipe, fade-in and fade-out. Prior art such as "Automatic Video Indexing and Full-Video Search for Object Appearances," Proc. 2nd Working Conf. on Visual Databased Systems, Budapest, 1991, pp. 119-133 by A. Nagasaka and Y. Tanaka and "Video Handling Based on Structured Information for Hypermedia Systems," Proc. Int'l Conf. on Multimedia Information Systems, Singapore, 1991, pp. 333-344 by Y. Tonomura teach segment boundaries detection methods but they are only capable of detecting sharp camera breaks. Another important area of video indexing is to select a representative frame known as Key Frame. This selection process as taught by prior art is based on motion analysis of shots and is complicated and prone to noise.